Join our long time member and colleague Débora Junker on March 11th:
“As the 100th anniversary of Paulo Freire’s birth approaches, we want to celebrate his life and work by reaffirming our commitment to embrace an emancipatory education as we, together, seek to reinvent his legacy.
Amid many disruptions such as attacks on democracy, the violation of human rights, the COVID-19 pandemic, the systemic racism against Brown and Black lives, and the intensification of economic and social inequalities, many have been led to experience hopeless and disbelief. However, as Freire always reminded us, it is paramount to never fall into cynicism and despair. On the contrary, the hardening of the hearts should motivate and inspire greater efforts in the continue and dignified struggle for social, economic, and environmental justice centered in a pedagogy that humanizes rather than dehumanizes.
Freire’s conceptualization of human’s unfinishedness opens the possibility to hope and to resist against all forms of dehumanization. Hence, it is through a collective struggle that humans intervene, recreate and transform the unjust world and announce a world steeped in love, ethics and responsibility.
Cátedra 2021 is honored to create a pedagogical space that brings together notable scholars—Antonia Darder, Henry Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Peter McLaren—to dialogue on the importance of re-inventing Freire. These remarkable authors, while contributing in different and varied ways dictated by the challenges of the current historical darkness, they all share Freire’s invitation to never accept the neoliberalist determinism, as they re-invent and re-create the precepts of Pedagogy of the Oppressed to unmask the ever-present violation of human ethics while re-committing themselves to the creation of a world that is more humane. The proposed dialogue provides educators, activists, and all who are agents of change with a remarkable opportunity to critically engage Freire’s ideas and ideals as applied to past, present, and beyond.”
More information is available online — register soon, as there is a limit to the number of participants.
- Débora B. A. Junker, Director and Founder of Cátedra Paulo Freire